The Annunciation: M/P.22-1938

Titles

The Annunciation

Maker(s)

Maker: Unknown

Entities

• Figure group
• part of a reliquary

Categories

• Enamels
• En ronde bosse enamel

Description

Gold, enamelled en ronde bosse with opaque white, and translucent blue, red and green enamels, on a later wooden base. The kneeling figures of the Virgin and the Angel Gabriel are surrounded by a low fence composed of three strands of twisted gold wire looped round short vertical poles.

Notes

History note: Geistliche Schatzkammer (Spiritual Treasury), Vienna; uncertain date in the 1860s, Salomon Weininger (1822-79); uncertain before testator

Legal notes

L.D. Cunliffe Bequest, 1937

Acquisition and important dates

Method of acquisition: Bequeathed (1938) by Cunliffe, Leonard Daneham

Dating

15th Century, Early
Circa 1400 CE - Circa 1450 CE

Note

The rare Annunciation group may originally have formed part of a reliquary. It is unusual in showing the Annunciation taking place in an enclosed garden (hortus conclusus) instead of the more usual an interior setting. It was formerly in the Spiritual Treasury of the Imperial Hapsburg Court in Vienna. Between about 1865 and 1870 it was sent for restoration to a dealer, Salomon Weininger (1822-79), who returned a copy and sold the original to an unknown collector. The fraud remained unnoticed until the twentieth century, but Weininger was imprisoned for a similar offence in 1876. The dark green stone base is a later replacement, and may have been made in Vienna in the 1860s by Salomon Weininger's assistants. The Annunciation illustrates the technique of enamelling directly onto a three-dimensional gold surface, known as ‘émail en ronde bosse’ which was perfected in France and Burgundy around 1400. It was previously attributed to a Parisian goldsmith active in the early fifteenth century, but is now believed to have been made in the Burgundian Netherlands around the middle of the century, on account of its similarities with a Burgundian brooch datable to c. 1430-40 in the Weitliche Schatzkammer, Vienna.

School or Style

Late Medieval